Let's talk for a moment about….IFRS. Now wait, stay with me, and try to keep a straight face while we go through this.
From the consulting perspective, this is just an accounting problem, right? Bring in the bean counters.
It looked for some time back in 2008 as if IFRS might actually happen in the US, but some dust-ups in 2012 over the responsiveness of the IFRS Interpretations Committee to issue resolution and concerns about costs effectively killed it. It's not officially dead – in its Strategic Plan for Fiscal Years 2014–2018 the SEC acknowledged the advantages of a single, global accounting standard, and the SEC mentioned in late 2016 that it continues to study IFRS, the International Financial Reporting Standards – but does anybody believe in Trump's America that IFRS will happen here? Anybody?